Thinking Outside the Box

When preparing for my demo earlier this month I planned out a little 2x2 table to force the player's characters into combat more quickly. I had originally planned to do some kind of bank heist scenario using loot and the safe boxes, but it seemed too far from the actual way the game is played. It wouldn't help if I made things more complicated just for the sake of a custom scenario. In the end I decided I'd do 200 reputation crews: Arkham City Batman and Robin vs Classic Harley, Joker (Killing Joke) with Turk along for the ride. Since I only had Turk painted I had some work ahead of me and only a few days to do it! Having a deadline is often helpful for me, even if it's a self imposed one. I was able to paint all four characters over a few sessions on Friday and Saturday. Harley's face detailing was just too small, so I wasn't even able to do some white in for her eyes, and may go back now that I'm no longer under pressure. The rest turned out very nicely ...

With play underway for the  Calgary Dreadball League's third season I had a finished season 2 human team, or a season 4 martian team that I could have used, but I didn't really want to play either of those teams in league play. This is the final of my four original season 1 teams to be painted. If you've stopped by and read any of my posts about other teams, you've have seen that many of them are based on characters from Masters of the Universe. The "Berserker Island Beasts" are based Beastman, who is also serving as their offensive coach. Despite looking through lots of reference images, I struggled to find a colour I liked for the fur and ended up using the bright P3 Ember Orange. Selecting uniform colours for the team was also a challenge as Beastman doesn't have much in the way of accessories or colours other than orange, and those he does have vary widely depending on the depiction. The Beastman figure I'll be using is an old Grena...

After I had my original four Avengers figures painted for the Marvel Universe Miniature Game , I knew I wanted to build up the list while I waited for some more cosmic figures to be released. Having already built several other early-release figures I looked through the cards and chose Wolverine, Black Panther and Deadpool to join my team. Deadpool still taunts me from my painting table, but the other two are finished and ready for battle. Wolverine is a nicely done sculpt. Appropriately small of stature and big on the snarls, he was a simple model to build. Only the forearms were separate and fit together easily. I mounted him on a resin base insert I had rattling around. Even based on that, he's still shorter than all the other Avengers, even Black Widow. I did some looking around online to see if I could find inspiration for a costume colour scheme, and ended up with the two-tone blue you see here. I think it fits nicely. His skin is GW Tallarn Flesh, washed with GW Bad...

Nightwing was a spur of the moment paint job a few days ago. While waiting for some washes to dry on another batch of figures I ended up alternating work on him. Although initially not very excited by the pose I'm really quite pleased with how he turned out. He took also took a minimal amount of time to do, clocking in at under 45 minutes start to finish including dry time. After priming him grey I applied two thin coats of black to get nice even coverage on the suit and mask. I followed that with a wash of GW Asurmen Blue, and once dry applied a light dry brush coat on all the black of AP Uniform Grey. It has a slight touch of blue in it and brought out the models details perfectly. The hair was done the same way, followed with two ink washes of black. On the blue detailing I painted a solid coat of P3 Platinum which I followed with two even coats of Tamiya Clear Blue. The face was done with a base coat of GW Flesh and then some highlight of Elf Flesh. In terms of gam...

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www.o2media.ca is open! They've got an excellent selection of figures and scenery from Knight Models for both the excellent Batman Miniature Game , and the new Marvel Universe Miniature Game . Currently service is only available to orders shipping within Canada, but options for service for US customers is being investigated. In the very near future they will also be launching their own line of custom-sculpted resin bases too, so it's well worth checking them out!

It's a good time to be a fan of tabletop, comic-themed gaming. There are a lot of options out there now; Marvel Universe and Batman Miniature Games both from Knight Models , Pulp City by Pulp Monsters , and even a few build-your-own character games like SuperSystem and Power Legion . Batgirl was the earliest free agent model that I purchased, as well as the first one that I started applying paint on. However, I found the level of detail off-putting and didn't get very far at first. When I built the model she required a bit of putty work, and I ended up adding some pouches on her hips to cover up some unsightly join lines. I confess that I like her pose but I dislike the single point of contact with the base as it has a lot of metal to support. I've already dropped her once and every time I pick her up I'm afraid she's just going to fall apart. When painting her I had originally opted to go with the straight black and yellow colour scheme from the ...